Challenge Faced In Medical Data Management

Handwriting - Challenge Faced In Medical Data Management

Medical data summarization and reorganization is a smart solution to the tedious work of medical record maintenance in current Healthcare world. The voluminous and scattered medical data in these records is neatly reorganized and scientifically represented in the form of summary. Variety of the records involved in the treatment process including consultation reports, admission report to surgery reports and also the diagnostic testing reports as well managed with the help of technology and manual supervision, so that these medical events are well-understood by the claim processors or attorneys and also proved a big support for physicians in treatment. It is really so easy to handle medical records? Are there any challenges faced while processing the medical summary and reorganization? Yes, there are multiple challenges to overcome to produce quality product and the biggest challenge the industry faces is “Handwritten data”.

Can handwriting be a challenge...?

In the current world of digitization, we are using different electronic fonts to generate documents, which are easy to read and comprehend. Also this data can be easily copied using ‘optical character recognition’.  But, it is very difficult to use this technique and is not 100% accurate method to extract data from handwritten document. This limitation is due to different styles of handwriting, personalized strokes used during writing and scanning quality of the handwritten documents. In the old records we may come across faded writing. Smudge ink is another limitation of handwritten records. Font size in handwritten documents can unable reviewer to comprehend the data. Handwritten documents have a lot of abbreviated data, which needs decoding.

What is the impact on summary...?

Reviewing handwritten documents needs expertise. If not comprehended properly review may have following errors:

1. Wrong date interpretation.
2. Wrong diagnosis/symptom interpretation.
3. Missing data.
4. Wrong observation or lab values-which could mislead the diagnosis.
5. Delay in work as more time is spent in reading handwritten data. 

Do we have solution...?

Having a sound knowledge of the domain helps correlating the illegible data. Expertise in medical record handling can easily assess the handwritten page. Learning to understand and comprehend different handwriting strokes can be an added advantage.  Developing a pattern to scan through the document for data capture can reduce missing data to null.

ITCube BPM is one of the leading companies who deal with such handwritten data to the level of 100% customer satisfaction. Team of medical domain expertise and experienced medical data summarizer with the help of technology deals with a load of handwritten documents daily and with around 10 years of experience ITCube is delivering accurate summary out of nearly illegible handwritten documents as well.